The November meeting of the Los Angeles InDesign User Group was held at Loews Hollywood Hotel which was both great and not so great. We were able to meet in the fancy space courtesy of Extensis which had held an industry meeting during the day. Since the room would sit idle in the evening, the company graciously allowed us to use it. (Thank you, Extensis!) It was a nice space complete with a professional AV set-up, a podium on a raised stage, banquet-style round tables, at a prominent hotel right in the heart of Hollywood.

The problem was that it was at a prominent hotel right in the heart of Hollywood. That meant—depending on where you were coming from—you might have had to start traveling three or four days in advance to get there on time. (Well, at least it seemed that way.) The hotel only offered valet parking at $50 a pop, but thankfully parking was available adjacent to the hotel for only $15. Sounds good compared to $50, but not compared to free as was parking at our September meeting.

The downsides aside, we had a successful meeting where everyone who attended received a free collapsible water bottle courtesy of Extensis, but most significant of all—information on what’s new in InDesign 2018. And that was the important thing, right?

Presenter David Creamer, who had travelled to Hollywood from North San Diego County, didn’t just read from a list of the program’s updates and new features. You can do that yourself here. Rather, he offered his take on the changes and updates, choosing to dismiss some and concentrate on the others he felt were worth it.

David was glad that endnotes has been added but didn’t feel they were as good as they could be. Using them, however, is easy. At the place you want an endnote, right click, choose endnote and a blank page (or a page including all previous endnotes if this isn't the first one) pops up. Enter the endnote text and you’re done. David doesn’t have InDesign 2018 videos, but a fellow named Martin Perhiniak does. Go here for more info on endnotes.

David also liked the fact that object styles now include options for size and position and described the new option in detail. Go here for more info.

The third thing he covered was paragraph borders. He included that with a brush up on the recently added paragraph shading option. He cautioned that paragraph borders can only include a single paragraph. Apply the effect to two consecutive paragraphs and each will have its own border rather than two paragraphs within a single border. Go here for more info.

Next David covered categorization of fonts. While searching for fonts, now you can narrow down the results by classification. Go here for more info.

CC libraries came next which now have a text only option. Previously text needed to be enclosed within a text box when it was added to a CC library. You can now also use text saved to a CC library in both InDesign and Illustrator documents. Go here for more info.

One enhancement that David mentioned but didn’t make a big deal of is the option to remove forced line breaks while generating a Table of Contents. This is the new feature that excites me the most. I don't have a Martin Perhiniak video showing it in action either. Am I the only one who likes this?

Martin Perhiniak didn't fine individual videos but didn’t make a comprehensive one showing all the 2018 InDesign updates and new features. But Daniel Walter Scott did. Go here.

Not specifically an InDesign 2018 update, but one of the things David mentioned that got everyone's attention was "multi-find/change" an extension from a company called Automatication that manages and executes batches of saved find/change queries.

All in all it was a good meeting, particularly as we move the meetings around Los Angeles County so that it’s in everyone’s backyard at least once during the year. William Gunn, however, didn’t wait for LAIDUG to come to his backyard. As the farthest attendee, having driven to Hollywood from Newport Beach, he won a Dell Inspiron 11 notebook computer.